Freenet Renamed to Hyphanet
hyphanet.org
hyphanet.org
The community doesn’t seem too pleased with this.
Trouble does seem to be brewing.
Freenet 2023: created by Ian Clarke in 2022-2023
Honestly I find it difficult to sympathize with people who get so attached to a system that they can't deal with being labeled as using the old version when the creator of that system wants to improve it 20 years later.
He has similar broad goals for the new system and I say every right to use the name. Why would people get so bent out of shape about being Freenet 1.0 and having a 2.0 exist now?
It would be different if the other developers involved with Freenet over the years had significantly modernized it or created a new paradigm, but that's not the case.
When people fail to adapt it makes me think they have cognitive limitations.
That was pretty and crippled Gnutella quite badly — even though Gnutella 2 actually had similar goals as Gnutella.
That’s the historical precedent. You can learn from it and avoid such steps, or you can ignore it.
Keep in mind that Locutus does not have privacy as a goal: if it harms the original Freenet like "Gnutella 2" harmed Gnutella, then privacy on the web suffers.
That its spam-control is significantly faster than earlier thanks to improvements for a university thesis?
That it’s performance has increased a lot due to improvements in the networking layer?
Is anyone running a node these days? What is your experience and reason?
I keep hoping that one day we’ll have a true “alt-net” like mastodon and Lemmy are starting to form, but for the most part these services (freenet/tor/etc) are dead or full of unsavory or illegal material.
Seems like it needs a bit more work. It does seem to be interesting, but what’s the point of a network with no one on it?
Having a simple site with no ads and no js is just a matter of intention. We can have those on the web if people really wanted to.
I don't have the answer but freenet isn't it.
There are legitimate reasons to use tor, but onion sites don’t seem to be part of it, and when I’m evading censorship to watch Netflix or something I’d rather use a vpn.
Freenet is more like a depository of documents, so you can't really host a site on it, there is no 2-way communication. In many ways it's a predecessor to ipfs.
In a liberal democracy, it makes sense that its use cases are mostly criminal, because the censorships it evades are mostly eroded by social reform. Those who are left are not hiding from censorship but from democracy.
However, when democracy and liberty are set aside, by fascism or war, these tools really shine. (E.g. BBSes being run on network printers during the wars in Europe in the 90's.)
I run one and Sone (social networking) and FMS (forums) are among my primary means of communication.
I use it to stream the creativecommons web series bloodspell because it is far too little known despite its awesomeness and this proves that streaming a series over Freenet / Hyphanet works.
Also Freesites these days aren’t slower than newspaper sites anymore — though part of the reason is that newspapers are crippled with advertisements and surveillance misfeatures. A well-made website on the clearnet is faster, but the typical site on Freenet / Hyphanet is no longer slower than the typical (ad-encumbered, heavy-JS-framework-loading) site on the clearnet.
As a user put it nicely: Freenet / Hyphanet: the internet that should have been.
You’re not responsible for the encrypted chunks that your node serves just like you’re not responsible for the money your ISP pays for the internet backbone.
But you are responsible for the people you recommend, so when you get information about something illegal, you are responsible to block them in your communication tool.